Tales of the Aggronaut

Of Obsessions

June 27, 2016 by Belghast

In Search of Trays

I could start this post off with a grumpy rant about changes to a game that I found out about over the weekend. However that would just end up creating a general down point for the coming week, so instead I am opting to try my best and push it out of my mind. Instead I am going to focus on the fun that I had this weekend and the positive points. The weekend also involved quite a bit of chasing wild geese, which in itself was a little interesting. My wife is of course a teacher, and over the summer she does what I figure most teachers do… obsess about the upcoming school year. For the last several years Target has had some multi colored trays that serve well as hand in baskets, but unfortunately the last set became brittle after sitting in the incoming sun for an entire year. So one of the things we have been watching for is them to start stocking them once again, and while we were in Kansas City we found two of the six colors, but did not end up picking them up because we assumed they too would be plentiful in our area. That however was not the case and this past week over lunch I went to check a few Targets, ultimately finding none. Saturday we wound up at our own local store and they happened to have four colors, allowing us to pick up most of a set.

The challenge with the Target dollar spot… is that every teacher ultimately stocks their classroom with the stuff located in it. That meant that we had a very limited window to be able to get the last two colors of trays. So Sunday after my wife got back from church we went roaming around the Tulsa metro area hitting quite literally every single Target store looking for a yellow and a purple tray. Fairly early on we found the yellow tray, but it was not until the very last store we went to that we managed to find purple. Ironically it was at the last store… the one furthest away from us… that they happened to have all six colors in one place. Had we reversed the order it would have likely been the one closest to us that had all six. As I commented this weekend on twitter, this is the life of a Teacher’s spouse. I cannot count the number of times we have made such trips hunting for this specific item or that… be it office supply stores, dollar stores or in this case a Target. Over the years I’ve spent many an hour sifting through disheveled bins of stuff looking for that one item that matches whatever other item we happened to be looking for. The sheer dedication that the average teacher has is just phenomenal, and even more so is the rapid sharing of tips that happens when you get two together. In Kansas City we rolled into the Target dollar spot and found the obvious signs of other teachers… and before we knew it folks were sharing tips on best ways to clean white boards or where you could find this or that item at a better deal. Long story short… we managed to complete the set of bins which marks this mission off the list… which I am certain will only be replaced by a dozen other similar adventures before school starts back up in a month and a half.

Of Artifice

As far as gaming goes I spent the bulk of my weekend running around in Rift, shifting back and forth between several different activities. Out in Twilight Highlands there was a limited time event called Arclight Ascendancy that allows players to run a couple of quests to get a currency… that can ultimately be saved up to purchase an Arclight Rider or Lifter mount. At some point I have apparently completed this event… either that or some account entitlement gave me a slew of currency. Essentially this event allows you to slowly gather the currency needed to purchase what would normally be a store only mount. In the past I have participated in similar events for the Budgie mounts, and in the grand scheme of things these are not intended to be completed in a single pass but instead over the course of multiple events. The interesting thing about them however is that one of the daily quests requires you to mentor down to within the 25-30 level range to accomplish it. As far as that goes Rift’s implementation of that system is probably the best I have seen because you simply right click your name and choose a new level… and then bam you are functioning at that level without having to give up any of your abilities. The other thing that I am enjoying about doing the quests is that it puts me back in Twilight Highlands and Scarlet Gorge on a daily basis… two zones that I absolutely loved from Telara.

The other big thing that I worked on this weekend was leveling my Artificer skill. This is of course slowly bankrupting me, but nonetheless I still felt the desire to keep pushing forward. I spent many an hour this weekend roaming around Gelboro Reef doing quests that I never finished out there… and farming up Thalasite ore and Sarleaf that would ultimately be converted into fuel to feed the fires of industry. Yesterday evening I managed to push ahead and get to the current level cap of 450. Now will I actually do anything with that level other than daily crafting quests? I honestly am not sure… I’ve never had a max level artificer before now. At this point in the cycle I doubt there is anything I can craft that is not better than the gear I can get from a combination of weekly patron chests and instant adventures/experts. However having a whole slew of crafters means that I can rapid-fire through the crafting dailies and get patterns quickly. I need to some time researching what if anything I can craft that is a damage upgrade… or more importantly a hit upgrade. Now that I have finished with another crafting obsession I really need to get back into the process of digging into the Planetouched Wilds. That area is huge and full of all manner of weekly quest opportunities, and I have barely scratched the surface.

MMOs and Steam Sale

June 24, 2016 by Belghast

The Sale is Here

It is that time once again, for the Steam summer sale… one of two major sales that seem to happen each year on the Steam platform. Over the years however it has changed significantly. The first one I actually participated in was just a bunch of bundles, that allowed you to get the entire game library of a specific company for insane discounts. I remembered I picked up the entire THQ library at the time including something silly like 40 games for $30 dollars. As the years have gone by the sale has morphed multiple times, often times incorporating mini-games into it, and even saw the introduction of the trading card product. The other thing that has changed… is that the discounts are nowhere near as insane as they once were, but instead the same basic price throughout the entire week. So instead of catching a four hour window of a game being 75% off, it might simply be 50% the entire duration of the sale. I guess this is both positive and negative, in that those flash sales inspired a ton of impulse buying… but also a ton of frustration in that if you didn’t happen to be watching the site at 3 am you maybe missed that one game you really wanted to pick up. Instead now it is just a good time to pick up those games that you had on your wish list, but for one reason or another never got around to picking up. Last night for example I picked up The Witness and Firewatch, because both are games we have kicked around as possible AggroChat game club titles in the future. Neither were really things I was in a rush to pick up, but I might as well catch a bit of a break in doing so.

How About MMOs?

Over the last several years a good number of MMORPGs have filtered their way onto the Steam library as a method of expanding their base, so while you won’t find Star Wars the Old Republic, or any of the Blizzard products because they are locked behind their own digital distribution systems… you will find a good number of other games. I thought I would poke my head around this morning and see what kind of deals are out there for those who heavily favor MMOs like myself. The result is a pretty mixed bag, and to be honest I just clicked on some of the games that interest me. There are likely deals out there for titles that I have never even heard of because Steam has been the great equalizer in expanding this genre. Additionally the term MMO has become utterly meaningless… which means you have everything from a MOBA, an Area Shooter, a Creative Building Game, and traditionally MMORPGs all sharing the same generic banner these days.

Final Fantasy XIV

I figured I would start this off with what I consider to be one of the better deals. Final Fantasy XIV is a huge game, and right now you are able to pick it up for half off the already fairly low starting price these days. You can pick up the base game for $9.99 and the Heavensward expansion for $19.99. The collectors edition version of the game is also available but you are only going to get a %20 break there.

Base Game and Expansion 50% off

Elder Scrolls Online

A similarly good deal is ESO which offers both the base game and the Imperial Edition at 50% off currently. The thing that I did find surprising however is that none of the DLC is actually sold through steam, which means you will have to watch the Crown Store if you want a break on those. The way to skirt all of the DLC issues is to of course subscribe, and still with only the base game you have a bunch of play time there. You can pick up the vanilla version for $19.99, but I would highly suggest just going ahead and grabbing the $29.99 Imperial Edition because it has enough perks to make it worth the little bit extra.

Base and Imperial Edition 50% off

Warframe

Warframe is of course a free to play title, and you can grab it from Steam at any point you like and start playing. However at some point you are going to want to spend some money, and in our brief experience playing the game… the Steam bundles seem to be a phenomenal deal. There always seemed to be some little perk that pushed them ahead of what you could get for the same amount of money from the in game cash shop. During the summer sale all of these bundles are 50% off making them even better deals. Generally speaking you get some in game currency, a bunch of really nice weapon and armor mods… and then some boosts which I never actually used. Well worth checking out if you play Warframe.

Currency/Mod packs 50% off

The Secret World

The Secret World has morphed payment models over the years and is now a “Buy to Play” title, which the base game being extremely cheap, and every few months them releasing a new “Issue” that includes new content. I ended up getting in on the ground floor of this game and purchased a lifetime subscription account, and as a result there is honestly no reason for me to ever buy anything else. That has been a double edged sword for Funcom, because it got them quite a few big purchases in the beginning… but a good number of the most devoted players these days are also Lifetimers so not really adding much cash flow to the product. All of this said… this game goes on sale rather frequently and each time I make a big production of spreading the word because it is a really amazing game. It has some of the best storytelling I have experiences in any MMO full stop. Right now you can pick up the base game for roughly $10 and the Ultimate edition that includes a ton of the Issue based DLC content for $20. If you do not own this game stop what you are doing and buy it now… that is all.

Base and Ultimate Edition 66% off

Wildstar

Wildstar has been down its own rocky road lately, and it is pretty new to the steam platform. As a result there are a lot of the offerings that are not participating in the summer sale. However if you missed out on the madness that was purchasing cheap retail boxes of the game to turn them in for subscription time and bonus goodies… then I highly suggest you check out the Cute and Cuddly pack. This includes both the Glitterkitty Hoverboard and the Snarflyx mount… and several other things. The discount is only 20% but right now Wildstar needs your love so if you are at all interested check the bundle out.

Cute and Cuddly Bundle 20% off

Eve Online

I have tried to play EVE and it just doesn’t click with me. It is the best asteroid mining simulator ever created, but I can never seem to break myself out of doing just that. It is one of those games that is extremely interesting to read about, but just not that interest for me to actually play. Once upon a time I was supposed to write a four part article series on this game, but I failed miserably to get past part two. All of that said… if you are an EVE player there are some extremely interesting deals during the Steam summer game. The base game is 75% off and the premium edition %50 off… but in addition since this game requires an active subscription steam apparently sells those too. It is hard to tell if those subs are actually on sale, or if they are just showing you the traditional “buy 12 months” discount. In any case it is not a bad time to buy into the game if you have always wanted to give it a shot.

Base 75% off, Premium 50% off

Rift

Rift is another one of those games that has seen wild mood swings in the payment model department, however as it currently stands the game is entirely free… with a few caveats. Each time they add new content as in zones and dungeons and systems… those are completely free and you can go from level 1 to the currently cap of 65 without spending a dime on the game. They do however offer you a plethora of methods for giving them money for little incidental things. Where the DLC packs come in is that you enter the game with a base set of souls, and over time they have released a new set with Storm Legion, Nightmare Tides, the recent Ascended Pack and entirely new class with the Planetouched Wilds. These are not included in the base game and have to be added on piecemeal, and this is largely the sort of thing that is being offered on Steam. There is also the grand daddy of all DLC packs the Rift Ultimate edition that packages up and includes everything you can get from the other packs. During the Summer Sale these are all 25% off, so its a good time to catch up on whatever souls you might be missing like the new Ascended Pack which is currently $26.24.

All DLC 25% off

YMMV

There are also a bunch of games that are not participating at all, like the Perfect World titles Neverwinter Nights and Star Trek online for example. While Rift and Trove are participating, ArcheAge does not appear to be. Basically this morning I wrote this post because at least for me personally… I rarely think of using the Steam sale as a way of catching up on my MMO content that I might have neglected. For those who only have the base game of Final Fantasy XIV for example… right now is a damned fine time to pick up Heavensward even if you have not gotten to that point in the story. Similarly like I said above if you were going to pick up various souls packs from Rift, you might as well do them now at a cost break. The Steam tagging system is often times a pretty horrible thing, but you might check out the Massively Multiplayer tag because it shows most of the deals that I was talking about above and much more. MMOs are kinda the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to gaming, and all of them you will be playing for months and potentially years ahead. It is well worth checking out during the madness that is the Steam sale.

Getting Unstuck

June 23, 2016 by Belghast

Not-Castlevania

It has been an up and down week for kickstarter games. Namely I am talking about just how bad Mighty No. 9 has been received. I own this on the PS4, and while the gameplay itself is not too horrible… the biggest problem that I have is that it feels like an odd throwback to the GameCube. Which I guess makes sense given that the game has released on a silly number of systems including the 3DS, which makes me think that quite simply all console versions… are the 3DS version. The saddest part about this is at various points during its development cycle the game looked really good, but the end result is this lifeless mess of flat color. Now earlier in the day I had commented that this whole debacle over the “Not-Megaman” game made me extremely concerned about “Not-Castlevania” which is my not so subtle jab at the fact that so many of these kick-started games are simply recreations of whatever game made the developer famous in the first place. Almost as summoned from the abyss… I got an email with a key to the E3 version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which I didn’t even remember being part of the funding level I backed the game at.

It was a little late and I only played the demo long enough to get up to the first boss… I failed miserably at even coming close to defeating it namely because I entered the fight after a lot of backtracking. There are certain things that work extremely well, then there are others that I was largely confused about. The primary point of confusion is that for whatever reason I could not seem to get the game to do jump attacks… which are of course a staple of the Castlevania gameplay. I was playing on my PS4 controller which I happened to have hooked up at the time to my PC, and notoriously it tends to map things oddly, so I might give it a shot with the defacto Xbox 360 controller. As far as every other aspect of gameplay… this is very much the spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night, but done with cell shaded 3D models instead of 2D pixel art. It works, and it works well.. and gives you the feeling of the Castlevania art style. The game has some really strange creatures that you end up fighting, which is cool and something vastly different from the standard zombies and werewolves and vampires oh my genre. I am assuming that the demo leaves off after the boss fight that is pictured above, but nonetheless I am really happy to see this game at least appears to be still on the rails.

Catching Up

Last night I got drug into Final Fantasy XIV by Ash and Grace… and admittedly they didn’t have to pull too terribly hard. Largely they wanted to run some Void Ark, which is the thing that I needed to do to get caught up in gear levels. I am not sure why this was such an impassible obstacle mentally for me, because I had some serious anxiety about solo queuing for it. Memu had made an offer to help me out, but we failed miserably at coordinating a time to run it together… mostly because I fell into a Rift shaped hope and wasn’t around all that often over the last week. In any case all of my concerns were essentially for naught, because Void Ark is extremely easy…. but unfortunately not the gear bonanza I had hoped it would be. Over the course of the night I ran the Ark three times, two times with Ash and Grace and one time by myself later after getting back from a walk. In all of those boss kills I managed to get two pieces of gear… only one of which actually replacing a slot I had something lower in. I did however get plenty of Esoterics which allowed me to keep upgrading jewelry until a combination of the that and the Mhachi Farthings pushed me over the item level 200 barrier.

Ultimately I am probably going to keep running this place until I run out of slots to upgrade, and even then…. it is still a decent source of gear to help pull my Dragoon up in item level. I guess I am officially off high center, and soon I can pick back up the quest chain and at least be expert viable once more. My hope is that tonight, I can get together with Grace and run the new dungeons who now also needs them since she too broke the 200 barrier last night. I feel better about the game in so many ways considering how frustrating it was to hit this gear wall in the questing. I guess in truth this is something that never happened to me during 2.0, or at least once we got back and started really moving forward. We were always just good enough to keep pushing into the next set of dungeons, but at the same time I was also spending a ton more time grinding out tomestones to make sure I was the best possible tank I could be at all times. That is the piece that has been missing, because I really have not been able to push myself to do that the way I once was. As our little rag tag Tuesday night group is contemplating doing more “Real” content I guess that will start to matter significantly more in the coming weeks and months. Time to get over the hump and gear up a bit, and for the moment Void Ark seems like an easy place to do just that.

Tech Triage

June 22, 2016 by Belghast

Last night went a bit off the rails early on. Traditionally I participate in the Final Fantasy XIV pony farm night on Tuesdays, and every since I showed up and won two mounts on my return… I have felt committed to be there and help more folks get theirs. However last night something else happened that precluded that obligation. When I got home sitting on the coffee table was my shiny new GTX 980 graphics card. I managed to make it through dinner successfully, but as soon as that was over I was upstairs tearing into my case to install it. First however I had to clean said case out… it is shocking just how damned dusty a computer can get so I had to drag my vacuum upstairs. I could have of course done the canned air thing, but firstly it would have choked me up horribly and secondly… said dust would just eventually end up right back inside the computer case. So for a period of time that was probably way shorter than it seemed I meticulously cleaned off the vans and interior surfaces of the case with the vacuum wand.

I get the card seated and tightened into place, and the only real frustration was the two 8 pin connectors. My power supply doesn’t actually have 8 pins… but instead it has six pin connectors with this little two pin that you sort of wedge in beside it. Trying to guide two different connectors in at the same time is extremely maddening but with some effort I finished the job, all the while anxious to boot things up and see purty graphics. Now this is the point where things start to spin out of control. Firstly I am bad at doing windows updates… and in rebooting my computer I had a whole slew of them apparently queued up to install and thanks to the glory of Windows 10 you don’t really get a reprieve. You reboot your computer for any reason and by god they are going to take that moment of weakness to install every fucking thing under the sun. After a sequence of three or four reboots, Windows decided to do two things that were maddening. Firstly it decided to uninstall the lovely Nvidia drivers that should have worked just fine since I was going from a 960 to a 980… and instead installing its completely useless stock driver. Secondly after a sequence of reboots I loaded into a game… and quickly realized I had no audio.

Some time ago I purchased an Asus Xonar DG audio card, and I really have enjoyed it. It sounds significantly nicer than the default Realtek on-board audio, with the only negative being that on my current motherboard it is sandwiched right up against the video card. Windows jettisoned the drivers, and I didn’t even get a little angry “no audio device found” message when it tried to load the tray icon tool. The tray icon tool for the Xonar drivers was simply gone. I guess in the grand scheme of things this probably makes sense, because the Xonar drivers I was running were some unified third party drivers that fix the faults in the card that the default Asus drivers still seem to have. In any case… I had no audio… which is the point at which I start trying to configure my damned onboard card once more. This of course took another series of reboots… the first being that I didn’t remember what the hell the MSI bios hotkey was. The second being me actually managing to mash the delete key at the right time to enter the bios, and finally the third being to install the damned drivers. Life was more or less peachy, until I once again began fiddling to try and make the on-board sound, sound considerably less horrible.

I started this process around 6 pm, and finally got to a point where I could start playing something around 9:30 pm. This is always what happens when you decide to open up your case and do quite literally anything. One thing leads to another, which leads to a desperate sequence of events… which finally leads to success but several hours past when you expected. I hopped on Teamspeak to sort out if the audio was set up properly and thankfully both Ashgar and Tam were there to help me test. Then I did what you do anytime you upgrade literally anything in your machine…. you start launching every game you have installed to tweak the settings. The new card does not of course make everything magically better. I still have a woefully outdated Motherboard and Processor, which I will have to address at some point, however I have more than enough graphics card to be able to run damned near anything I care to throw at it. The fun thing I learned last night is that Nvidia Experience is woefully confused as to what my system can actually run. I’ve often used their optimization as a baseline to then go in and further tweak until things are a good mix of pretty and performance. However thanks to the outdated CPU it just sort of throws its hands up and chooses low at times. Whereas pretty much everything I have thrown at it since last night has been able to bump on up to ultra settings regardless of the outdated processor.

So that is my fun evening and I have peppered the post with various screenshots taken in the games I loaded up… and happened to think to take a screen shot. I am sure I will likely tweak each of them further, and also try flipping various games to Dynamic Super Resolution which seems to work awesome now, when it only barely worked before. Huge apologies to my friends in FFXIV, but thankfully I did warn them that it was a possibility yesterday. Hopefully everything went off over there without a hitch and I will join them next week like normal. In the meantime… I am probably going to continue spending the next several days… launching games and logging out of them just to see what the difference is. I am also wondering if somehow when I installed the Video card… if I managed to unseat the audio card. I will probably give that a shot tonight, but I made that realization way too late in the evening for me to venture back inside of my case that night.